R sometimes does not save my history

Question

I have a program in R. Sometimes when I save history, they do not write into my history file. I lost some histories a few times and this really drive me crazy.

Any recommendation on how to avoid this?

Answer 1

First check your working directory (getwd()). savehistory() saves the history in the current working directory. And to be honest, you better specify the filename, as the default is .History. Say :

savehistory('C:/MyWorkingDir/MySession.RHistory')

which allows you to :

loadhistory('C:/MyWorkingDir/MySession.RHistory')

So the history is not lost, it's just in a place and under a name you weren't aware of. See also ?history.

To clarify : the history is no more than a text file containing all commands of that current session. So it's a nice log of what you've done, but I almost never use it. I construct my "analysis log" myself by using scripts, as hinted in another answer.

Answer 2

@Stedy has provided a workable solution to your immediate question. I would encourage you to learn how to use .R files and a proper text editor, or use an integrated development environment (see this SO page for suggestions). You can then source() in your .R file so that you can consistently replicate your analysis.

For even better replicability, invest the time into learning Sweave. You'll be glad you did.